The Sun, the Times, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Daily Express, the Evening Standard and the Independent report that Syria’s air defence has shot down nine “Israeli missiles” after fresh airstrike over Homs. Videos on social media show what appear to be shots fired over a region North of Damascus. Reports said the Israelis fired missiles at the Shayrat airbase in Homs province, the same base that was targeted by US airstrikes last year. The Syrians said that all the missiles fired last night were shot down. There was no immediate comment from Israel, but an Israeli military spokesman has since said he was “not aware of such an incident.” The country’s air force has carried out several bombing missions in Syria in recent months.

The Times, the Guardian, BBC World Service’s Newshour, the Daily Mail, and BBC News Online also reports that tensions between Russia and the West were heightened yesterday as international inspectors were delayed from travelling to the scene of a chemical weapons attack in Syria. A team of international inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) will now visit the site in Douma, near Damascus, tomorrow. The group have been in Syria since Saturday. UK Prime Minister Theresa May accused Moscow of blocking access to the site after the director general of the OPCW told diplomats that Russia and Syria were preventing the team from travelling to the area. “It is perfectly clear that Russia is preventing, is stopping, is blocking, our opportunities to ensure that we can properly hold to account those responsible for chemical weapon attacks in Syria,” the Prime Minister told Parliament.

BBC News Online, the Evening Standard, the Guardian,  the Telegraph, the Independent and the Times report on the House of Commons debate on airstrikes in Syria. May warned that waiting for the United Nations to authorise military action in future would effectively give Russia a veto on British foreign policy as she defended her decision to join international air and missile strikes against the Syrian regime. She faced down her critics in a heated debate in the Commons in the wake of the atrocity, which she described as “a stain on our humanity,” insisting the UK had needed to act rapidly to prevent further attacks.  May faced widespread recrimination for launching strikes before consulting parliament – although many of those MPs said they would have given her their support – but she suggested the “security” of the operation could have been compromised by consulting parliament.  BBC News Online and the Independent report that MPs will consider Parliament’s role in approving military action after an emergency debate was secured by UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The Telegraph and the Times report that Labour MPs broke ranks to criticise Corbyn and his frontbench allies for their stance on Syria and Russia. The Labour leader was attacked after refusing firmly to attribute blame for the deadly gas attack in Syria or the Skripals’ poisoning in Salisbury and for opposing military action in response to the use of chemical weapons.

The Independent reports that The European Union has said it “understands” the need for the US, French and British air strikes in Syria over the weekend, but called for the “urgent” resumption of peace talks to end the civil war and stop it “spiralling” out of control into a global conflict.

The Telegraph reports that US President Donald Trump considered launching a strike three times as big on Syria, potentially including hitting Russian air defence systems, but was dissuaded by James Mattis, his Defence Secretary. The Pentagon presented Trump with three options for how to respond to the chemical attack by the Syrian regime in Douma on 7 April, the Wall Street Journal reported. A first, and most cautious, option consisted of a limited strike on Syrian chemical weapons facilities, while a second targeted those plus military command posts. The third option had the aim of devastating Bashar al-Assad’s military forces and could have targeted Syrian-based Russian air defence capabilities as part of that. Such a strike would have been three times the size of the military action that was eventually launched by the US, UK and France in the early hours of Saturday.

BBC News Online reports that the Syrian president has revealed that his children had a holiday last year at Artek, a famous Russian-run youth camp on the Black Sea. Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma have two sons – Hafez (16) and Karim (13) – and a daughter, Zein (14). Artek symbolised communist values in Soviet times and remains a popular resort. It lies in Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014. “My children were at Artek last year. After that trip they had a better understanding of Russia,” Assad said, according to Russian MP Dmitry Sablin, who met him in Damascus on Sunday.

The Telegraph and the Times report that Diane Abbott, the Shadow Home Secretary and one of Jeremy Corbyn’s most senior allies, illustrated a tweet about Syria with a computer-generated fake image of an Israeli jet bombing the capital of Iran. The photo, which was taken from an aviation blog and posted in 2012, shows an Israeli F-15 fighter over Tehran, with large explosions in the background. It was created by Al Clark and posted by David Cenciotti on The Aviationist blog in March 2012, accompanied by a clear explanation of what the image shows.  He also included a note underneath the mocked-up photo marking it as a computer generated image which is “not a drawing, nor a rendering or a photo”. Abbott posted the image on Twitter on Monday morning after listening to a BBC Radio 4 Today Programme interview with Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary.

The Guardian published a column by John Crace that argues “May [served] up lame excuses for not giving MPs a say on airstrikes” and that even though she billed it a gesture, Parliament should still be consulted.

The Daily Mail via AP reports that an “electrifying” new documentary series on the problematic integration of Middle Eastern Jews by Israel’s European founders in the 1950s has reopened old wounds of an ethnic divide within Judaism ahead of the country’s 70th anniversary festivities. “The Ancestral Sin” has ignited outrage and disbelief by arguing that the immigrants were systematically marginalised by seemingly bigoted bureaucrats. The controversy has exposed just how raw sentiments are about the history of relations between Mizrahi Jews, from the Middle East and North Africa, and those from Europe, known as Ashkenazim.

The Daily Mail via AP reports that Israel says it is sanctioning the owners of Gaza buses used to transport Hamas activists to border demonstrations. The head of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the military body for Palestinian civilian affairs, wrote on Facebook that 14 companies ignored warnings and bused “violent” protesters. Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai said Monday that they and their families will be denied extra “privileges” and ties to Israel will be “cancelled,” without elaborating.

Yediot Ahronoth, Maariv and Haaretz all report on a Tom Friedman article in the New York Times which quoted a senior IDF source confirming that Israel attacked the T-4 base in Syria. Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said: “The Zionist entity will receive an appropriate response sooner or later and they will regret what they did. The days of Israel’s hit and run are over. The Syrian forces and the resistance (Hezbollah) forces are on the ground and they are capable of responding to those crimes at a time that suits them.”

Writing in Yediot Ahronoth, Ronen Bergman quotes Israeli officials who believe the American attack failed to achieve most of its goals and will not deter Assad. “If President Trump ordered the attack in order to show that the United States has responded to Assad’s use of chemical weapons, then that goal indeed was achieved. But if there was an additional goal, such as to cripple the ability to deliver chemical weapons or to deter Assad from using them again – it’s highly unlikely whether any of those goals were achieved.”  Bergman argues that only some of the sites that Israel knows to be used by Assad to store chemical weapons were destroyed in the American attack.

All the Israeli media report that Memorial Day for the Fallen of Israel’s Wars and Victims of Terrorism will begin this evening at 8pm when a one-minute siren will sound, followed by official ceremonies at the Western Wall and the Knesset. Tomorrow at 11am, the state memorial service for Israel’s fallen soldiers will be held at Mt. Herzl, and at 1pm the memorial service for victims of terrorism will start there. The media set aside a large portion of their front-page sections to focus on articles about bereaved families and soldiers who were killed in war.

Kan Radio News reports that an Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day ceremony will be held this evening at 9pm near the Ganei Yehoshua Park in Tel Aviv. This is the ceremony’s 13^th year, and writer David Grossman is scheduled to speak at it. The High Court of Justice is due to rule this morning on the petition against Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s decision to prevent about 110 Palestinians from attending the ceremony.

Maariv quotes a Channel 10 report that the State Attorney’s Office is expected to recommend that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu be charged in connection to Case 1000 (the gifts affair) with breach of trust, but not for bribe-taking, which was the police’s recommendation. The decision would mean that Arnon Milchan will not be prosecuted, and will be able to testify against the Prime Minister along with his personal assistant Hadas Klein, who is considered a key witness. The article also mentions a poll that was published yesterday by the Panels Politics Polling Institute on the Knesset Channel which shows a large margin between the Likud on 29 seats, and Yesh Atid with 20 seats.

Maariv reports that European officials recently presented Hamas with a far-reaching proposal that a European institution will undertake management of social services and responsibility for paying salaries of officials in the Gaza Strip, in exchange for which Hamas will forswear the violent struggle against Israel for at least five years.

Kan Radio News reports on a missile attack in the area of Homs and Damascus, although the accuracy of this event is under question. Six missiles were reportedly fired at the Shayrat military air base, and three at the al-Dumayr airbase near Damascus, with sources in the Syrian capital saying that all the missiles were intercepted. Sources in the US Department of Defence denied any connection to the strike, and the IDF Spokesperson’s Office declined to comment on the reports.